Last month, I reported that NASA was forming a department dedicated to searching Space for asteroids that could strike Earth.
The Office of Planetary Defense is supposed to protect us, but it’s already 0-1, because LOLZ said Space to its mission, sending a meteorite that killed a human for the first time in forever.
A bus driver in Tamil Nadu, India is now the first victim in our new war against Space.
From The New Indian Express:
It’s been confirmed that it was an object falling from the sky, and not a blast of explosive substances, that killed a bus driver of an engineering college near Natrampalli in Vellore on Saturday, [Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa announced].
The impact that killed a 40-year-old bus driver shattered the windshields of five buses parked on the campus and gouged out a small crater on the ground. Students scurried out of their classes when they heard the deafening impact.
Initial eyewitness accounts said they saw a mysterious object falling from the sky. It hit the ground and caused an explosion.
Is it a taunt? A threat? A playful rock hurled our way by space to remind us how feeble our attempts to stop it are? Har har har, says Space, mocking our pitiful faith in our own ingenuity and resolve to save our species from Space’s wanton acts.
Har har har, indeed.
According to International Comet Quarterly, the last person to be struck and killed by a meteorite was in 1825.
[Via Newsweek]